Faith & Spirit Quote by Julia Ward Howe

Pregnancy shows up here not as a haloed destiny but as an occupation: an “unwelcome little unborn” squatting in the speaker’s mind, body, and even spirit. Howe’s phrasing is deliberately hard-edged. Calling the fetus “little” and “unborn” keeps it abstract, almost impersonal, while “unwelcome” yanks the sentimentality rug out from under the era’s pieties about motherhood. The line “my brain will be lightened” is a brutal, intimate admission that gestation can feel like cognitive fog and psychic crowding - a complaint still recognizable today, but radically undomesticated in 19th-century print culture.

The subtext is about sovereignty. Howe doesn’t just want the pregnancy to end; she wants to be “in possession” again, language that treats the self like property reclaimed after an unlawful seizure. That legalistic verb matters from an activist who lived amid coverture norms and tight social scripts for women. Even when women were celebrated as moral centers of the home, they were rarely granted full ownership of their own time, labor, or bodies. Howe’s gratitude - “Thank God” - is not meekness so much as strategic framing: she can voice taboo resentment while still speaking in the acceptable religious register of her day.

Context sharpens the stakes. Howe was a reformer and public thinker, yet the quote reveals the private cost of being conscripted into compulsory femininity. It’s not an argument for or against motherhood; it’s a refusal to pretend pregnancy is automatically sacred when it can also feel like dispossession.